According to my in-depth calculations, that means we only have 79 days until the first professional soccer game in Las Vegas! That isn't that long at all.
It looks like the cheapest single-game tickets start at the very reasonable price of $15. That will get you a spot in the corner grass berm, for those who don't mind not having a metal bench or plastic seat to sit on. And that $15 is just for the MLS games and the first game - I'd imagine that there will be other games during the course of the regular season that dip below that price.
You can't really ask for better than that. I mean, you could feasibly take the whole family to a game for the price of a single ticket to one of the other pro teams that are/will be in town.
As I was thinking about the ticket prices, I was wondering what effect the pricing would have on the quality of player on the field. In other words, at these ticket prices, how much money are the Lights going to take in in gate revenue, and how will that effect the salary/quality of player that the team will be able to bring in?
Here is what I came up with using very complicated and detailed scientific formulas:
Ok, so full disclosure, this was really not scientific at all. Cashman Field has a total capacity of ~ 9,000 if you are counting only the seats, plus an extra ~ 3,000 if you include the grass berms. Based exclusively on the picture on the ticketing website, the seating looks like it's about split into thirds - 1/3 in the corner (behind home plate for a 51s game), and 1/3 to either side. Throw in a couple hundred box seats, and you have a very very rough estimate of the money the team can bring in at any one game.
Now, I wrote a post a bit ago about the average attendances for USL games. Based on other attendances around the league, it seems unlikely that the Lights will be able sell out every game. Generally, it looks like a good average attendance for a non-MLS B team in USL is around 4,000 to 5,000. I think the Lights should be shooting for more than that, since our market is larger than a lot of the others in USL (for example, Reno, population ~ 400,000, averages around 5,000 people per game, so Las Vegas, population ~ 2,000,000 should be able to get more than that). Realistically, Cashman Field should be between 50% and 75% capacity for most games.
So, you figure that based on my loose calculations, gate receipts for the team should be between $3M and $4M for the whole season (assuming about 20 home games, including friendlies).
If the team can pull that off, that is a healthy budget for a USL team. And that isn't even counting what the team can bring in as far as shirt and other sponsorship dollars (I tried to find out approximately what those numbers would be, but it's hard to find, so I'll have to do a deeper dive later).
As I discussed in a previous post, the average salaries around the league are not going to be sky-high. So with this kind of income, plus whatever sponsorship, TV, and other dollars the team can bring in, the Lights should be able to bring in more than enough money to be competitive.
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